I'm highly annoyed. Peeved, if you will.

Let's just stop a moment and think about the cars we own (if we do own one). I, for one, own a reliable and friendly Subaru Impreza renamed "The Return of the Donkey". The original was a craptastic 1986 Mazda 626 warwagon that died on me. I'm fairly certain that I'm running my current one into the ground.

Granted, I live in NYC. I really don't need a car. But since I can actually have it for now, there's no reason for me not to, right? I live in a mostly residential neighborhood in Manhattan and there's plenty of alternate-side-of-the-street parking for me. For those of you not on the East Coast, that means that you cannot park one one side of the street on certain days for certain amounts of time so that they can clean the street. Apparently, they've never heard of it on the West Coast. How do you clean the streets?

Anyway, I digress.

So this car of yours. You love it, right? You treat it well, you love it. I love my damn car and it has been broken into five times in the course of two years. I assume it's because I have Delaware plates. Either way, I treat it very well and there's no stopping thug monkeys when they get the urge.

But what I'm pondering is this: if your car has an alarm and it goes off when you are in the vicinity, how long do you wait before turning it off?

Or: if your car has an alarm and you are gone, what happens when it goes off for two hours at 6am, waking up all your neighbors, keeping them awake for two hours, and you are nowhere to be found to turn it off?

The second question is the one that I happen to be obessesed with since I find myself the unwitting and unwilling victim of a car alarm wake up. I mean, someone in my neighborhood has a rooster (don't ask, I can't explain it) and while it cock-a-doodle-doos in the morning, it was nowhere near as bad as this car alarm.

This car alarm was the kind that goes through six (yes, I counted) different sounds in a cycle and repeats itself over and over very loudly. I could probably even mimic the noise at this point. I think it was right outside my window.

And you know the worse part? No one was taking the car. No one was trying to break in, either. Nope. This alarm was probably set off by a pigeon or a school kid on their way to school. That's right, no break-in, no grand auto theft, just something that triggered the alarm to go off.

Oh, and P.S., it would go through about three cycles and stop in the middle of the cycle, right in the middle of one of the six sounds it made. And I would be lying there in bed thinking to myself, "Ah! Finally!"

And then it would pick up three seconds later right where it left off.

Oy.

Which leads me to an important query: do you really need a car alarm if you aren't going to be anywhere in the vicinity to either: a. turn it off or b. stop someone from stealing your car? Because if you aren't going to be around where you park it, does it really matter that you have an alarm or not? I mean, if it's a really determined thug monkey, they would have picked up that you are nowhere around to turn it off. And they might steal the car from your ass, anyway.

So do you and your neighbors a favor. If you aren't going to be home and you leave your car in a residential neighborhood where there is even the remote possibility of your car alarm going off, think about it. Because it's a major pain in the ass for those of us who just live there.

And I'm freakin' exhausted because of it. If I find out who owns that car (which was a 1980's model Tercel painted two different colors - you have got to be kidding me, we don't even have a car alarm on our Mercedes), they are getting an earful from me. Maybe I'll mimic the sounds outside their window at 6am tommorow morning.

Ah, who's kidding. Hopefully, I'll be in bed at 6am tommorow morning, catching up on the lost sleep I got today.

Damnhellass.